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Southwest Washington: introduction

This school year, I’m working on a series of projects relating to my neighborhood of Southwest Waterfront. Since this semester’s work is with a team of other students less familiar with the neighborhood, I’ll be posting resources about the neighborhood on a periodic basis, which you can easily find using the swdc tag.

A few months ago, I gave a short presentation to CNU-DC based on a summertime walk around the neighborhood. Note that this covers only the Waterfront residential neighborhood, not the Southwest Rectangle (Federal Center & L’Enfant Plaza) office precinct north of I-395. You can download the PowerPoint or take a look at the photos on Flickr.

There are also a lot of great, easy-to-use online resources. I particularly like:

Other resources of note: a recent Post article about River Park, a UMd studio report [large PDF] about the historic merits of a few remaining blocks of pre-renewal urban fabric, and a brief overview article [from the same guy who wrote the CLF articles] about the history of the modernist parks [page 9 of this PDF]